Ottawa interior decorator: Easy as A-B-C home office makeover

Well, actually, it wasn’t quite as easy as A-B-C. And it took a year to finish. But my home office is finally done…

Have I mentioned that when we moved into our house in 2001, almost the whole house was painted green?? This room in the basement was one of them… the green walls and orangey wood trim is just icky. Not crazy about the parquet floor either.

This was the previous owner’s gun room. Seriously. There were bullet casings sitting on the ledge when we moved in. So what better way to repurpose a gun room than to turn it into a bedroom!!

We also had a guest bedroom upstairs. And even though I thought the bedroom in the basement was nicer, nobody ever wanted to sleep in it. It was essentially a waste of space. So, I decided to turn it into my home office. We moved all the furniture into the other guest bedroom, which we swapped with the existing office on the main floor. You can read about that bedroom makeover here.

So the room was a blank slate. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it — because I love to write, and because I wanted my office to be creative and inspiring, I used this nursery that I found on Rate My Space as my inspiration:

The colours for my office came from the striped rug you can see at the bottom of this picture (I ended up returning the rug because it just didn’t fit properly in the room).

The walls are Sico Powdered Iron 6173-31, the light letters are Iron Salts 6173-11, and the dark letters are Iron Rod 6173-52.

I created a letter mural in Adobe Illustrator. Hubby borrowed a projector from work one weekend, and we used it to project the AI file onto the walls. Good thing he’s so smart —he figured out how to project the image off a mirror and onto the wall to get it big enough :-) Then we traced all the letters onto the wall. And then it was the fun part —painting every single letter by hand. UGH!! I taped off as many letter as I could, but the big C and the big Q were pretty much done all free-hand.

It was a big job and it took a LOT of patience. But I did it in chunks of a couple of hours at a time, and I got the letters painted in about a week.

Our dog Carbo died while I was working on the letter mural. Can you see my tribute to him at the right end of this wall??

I tried painting the small letters to spell words (see Laugh and Goals?), but it was really hard painting the small letters, and they came out kind of sloppy. I found a printer in Ottawa (Business Cents) that could print the words for me on silver vinyl. Much faster and easier to stick the letters to the wall than to paint them!!

As you can see in the last two pictures, the parquet floor is gone. We planned to have the parquet refinished. But when Luigi the flooring guy started to work on the floors, he discovered water damage that we weren’t aware of. Crap!! Well, 50% crap — this meant we had to pull up all the parquet and replace it, which delayed things. But that gave us an excuse to get rid of the parquet that we didn’t like anyway :-) We got a deal on zebrano laminate at Home Depot. It was discontinued and they only had about 27 boxes, but that was enough for my little office, another room in the basement, and a friend’s sunroom :-)

At this point, there was a long gap in time before we made more progress on my office. This past summer, hubby drywalled over the steel I-beam and pipes that you can see in this picture:

And then we had to do something about that unfinished basement ceiling. We eventually came up with a design for a drop ceiling that looks like a coffered ceiling.

Yes, that’s crown moulding!! It’s actually for function more than aesthetics — it helps support the drop ceiling. Although it does finish off the walls & ceiling nicely :-) Hubby also removed the one bulb in the middle of the room and replaced it with four pot lights.

The office door was originally a pinky oak pocket door in the kitchen. Hubby cut it down to size, and then I primed it and painted it white. I also painted the brass trim around the windows black, to emulate the black steel doors & windows that I love :-)

Now it was time to put the room together. Weeehoooo!!! And just in time, too, because I needed a place to do my homework. Because I need a drafting table, I had to arrange the furniture differently than I’d originally planned. But that’s OK, because the revised layout works great. So with no further ado, here’s my finished office…

Do you remember my sunburst mirror project?? Well, now it has a new home :-) And see the mirrored birds on the walls?? They’re magnetic, and we attached them to the wall simply by finding the drywall screws — the metal screws attract the magnets :-)

I really wanted the Vika Glasholm glass desk top from Ikea, but none of the legs that I liked work with this top. So, we designed and built the desk base :-) It’s walnut with purple heartwood in the corners. The glass sits on little rubber pads that are stuck to the top of the desk base.

As you can see, the glass top continues the alphabet/word theme :-)

I wanted a rug on the floor to add some softness and warmth, but I didn’t want anything too big because I love the zebrano flooring and didn’t want to hide too much of it. This faux lambskin rug from HomeSense is perfect :-)

I created a number of vignettes along the ledge. My mom made these A & Z ceramic bookends years ago, and now I have the perfect spot for them :-)

The two purple paintings are by my friend, New Brunswick abstract artist Matt LeBlanc. I made the turquoise painting a few years ago, but never found a place to hang it. I thought it would work well with Matt’s paintings…

I won this cool white rococo frame from PK at Room Remix and Maureen at The Inglenook Decor. Thanks ladies!! My desk is the perfect spot for it. And as you can see, the purple & turquoise of the paintings are repeated in the picture in the frame…

And that’s my new office. I’m thrilled with how it came out — it’s such a great feeling to see a room come together just the way you envisioned it :-) And I’m proud of the fact that hubby and I did it all ourselves :-)

And now I’m off to my office to do homework. You’ll probably have more fun than me if you head over to Between Naps on the Porch and check out al the great makeovers at Susan’s Metamorphosis Monday blog party :-)

Oh, but before you go, be sure to check out this post — you could win a mystery Christmas gift from Victoria and me :-)

Copyright DesignTies 2010 at design-ties.blogspot.com

Met Monday goes smart

Happy Met Monday!! Once again, thanks to Susan at Between Naps on the Porch for hosting this fun event :-)

Kelly @ JAX Decor & Design

The June 2008 issue of Met Home features the top 100 designs of the year. The top designs include bees, bikes, and beers – and of course, home design and architecture too. When you think about it, design is all around us and inspires us in many ways. It’s about much more than how we decorate our homes – it’s about our lifestyles and the things that we use and touch and see and feel every day.

The space I was planning to share with you for this Met Monday isn’t quite finished. So rather than rushing to get it done, I decided to share a different design metamorphosis with you this week. It’s a bit “outside the box”, but it’s about a design that I consider to be a unique piece of art… stick with me and you'll see why :-)

This is a wall in my office:
As I mentioned in a previous post, it was inspired by a room I saw on Rate My Space. It was also inspired in part by one of my watches – the Swatch GE 162 (from the spring-summer 2005 collection):

I was attracted to these designs because they both reminded me of this:

That’s a close-up of a Numeric Blue panel from a smart fortwo. The June 2008 issue of Metropolitan Home named the smart fortwo the #4 design of the year:

We have two smart cars – one is an all-black convertible, the other was a silver & blue coupe. And that’s the subject of my Met Monday post…

The smart fortwo was first introduced in Europe in 1998. It was a collaboration between Swatch and Mercedes Benz – hence the sm- in the name. I don’t know for sure, but the -art must stand for just that – art.

The fortwo eventually made its way to North America in late 2004 when the little cars started popping up on the roads in Canada.

I had to have one. I dragged hubby to the nearest Mercedes dealer to take a look at the fortwo in person. That was December 2004. In March 2005, we decided to buy one. Weeehoooo!!!!

With all the options to choose from, it took forever to select our fortwo. We decided on a pulse with star blue metallic panels, silver tridion, panoramic glass roof, and heated seats. That last one was a no-brainer – there’s nothing like having a hot tush when it’s -30 outside!! And the pulse comes with shifter paddles right on the steering wheel, which is super-cool.

We ordered our smart in April 2005. Six months later (yes, SIX MONTHS), our little blue & silver smart finally arrived. It was a l-o-n-g wait, but so worth it – the smart is the most fun car EVER!!! We named our new smart "squish". It's just what smart owners do!! :-)

Even before our smart hit the assembly line in France, I set out on a mission – to get a set of the absolute BEST smart car panels out there. They’re called Numeric Blue – they’re turquoise and covered in numbers and letters and are totally funky and I HAD TO HAVE THEM!!!!! I’ll spare you the details of all the dead ends that I hit along the way. Suffice to say, I sent e-mails all over the world – Canada, Sweden, England, Germany, Australia, Burkina Faso...

In July 2007, I finally found a guy in Guernsey, UK with a set of Numeric Blue panels for sale. Then I waited for him to send them to me. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. I waited till October 2008 – over a year – for those panels. And when they finally arrived, I was beside myself with excitement 8-)

I zipped over to the post office in our little pick-up truck to pick them up. They came in two big – but light – boxes. Somebody helped me get the first box out to the truck (I was blocking the doorway with my big box, so he couldn’t get out till I was out of the way!!). I went back in and handled the second box by myself. I guess the adrenaline was pumping!!

I brought the boxes home and carried them up to the front porch – which was when I decided I needed to take some pics to record this momentous occasion!! (Who knew you could ship a car across the ocean in a couple of cardboard boxes, eh?!)

Then I put the boxes in the hallway and pulled everything out:

Then I piled up the bubble wrap by the door and contemplated what the heck I was going to do with it all:

And then I put all the panels in a completely logical place – hubby's office!!

Believe it or not, it only took hubby a few hours to change our smart from this…

Into this:




Pretty cool metamorphosis, don’t you think?! :-)

When I had just about lost hope that I would ever own these beautiful panels, I found other ways to bring similar designs into my life with my Swatch and my office walls. Which goes back to what I said at the beginning of this metamorphosis... design is all around us and inspires us in so many different ways :-) It can be in anything from a song to a flower to a car, and you never know when or where you'll find it!!

Now, to see more designs that may inspire you, drive on over to Between Naps on the Porch!!